1180-1203: The Failure of the Komnenian System

Manuel Komnenos died in 1180 'on a melancholy September day'. He had been well aware of the dangers that lay in wait for his young son and heir Alexius. As his health failed, he did all he could to safeguard the boy's succession. He had married him to a French princess, as prestigious a match as he could find. At the same time he arranged for his daughter, the Porphyrogenite Maria, to marry Renier of Montferrat, who came from the greatest house of northern Italy. In this way he hoped to preserve Byzantine influence in the West. Nearer home he sought to safeguard the frontiers of his Empire by getting his allies, such as Bela of Hungary, Kilidj Arslan, the Seljuk sultan and various crusader princes to guarantee the succession of his young son. There remained his cousin Andronicus Komnenos, a mortal enemy of his family. He was lurking in exile beyond the north-eastern frontiers of the Empire, Manuel induced him to come to Constantinople, where in an emotional scene the old enemies were reconciled. Andronicus took an oath to protect the young emperor and received most of Paphlagonia as an apanage.

These were sensible measures, but they were based on the fatal assumption that the emperor's prestige would ensure that they were respected after his death. Such a hope was undermined by his choice of his wife Maria as guardian of their young son Alexius. She was a crusader princess. She was, in Eustathios of Thessalonica's words, "ripe with love", however hard she may have tried to conceal it. Eustathios, the foremost Homeric scholar of his age, was appropriately casting her in the role of a new Helen. As he put it, "Burning love, almost consciously loosed evil upon the world." Is such an explanation just fanciful? Not perhaps entirely. Byzantine political life depended upon a delicate balance of interests, which Manuel Komnenos had managed to preserve. Now that he was gone, political rivalries were likely to flare up at the slightest pretext. Far from being able to control them, the empress herself became a political prize. She was to fall, ensnared by love, to the Protosebastos Alexius Komnenos, one of her late husband's nephews. He became her lover and effective ruler of the Empire. His promotion split the house of Komnenos into warring factions. The empress's chief rival was her stepdaughter, the Porphyrogenite Maria, who for so long had been the heiress to the Byzantine throne. She was the natural focus of opposition to the new regime and therefore immediately suspect. Learning that her supporters had been seized she fled with her husband to seek sanctuary in the church of St. Sophia. She was warmly welcomed by the Patriarch Theodosius Boradeiotes, who resented the way he had been ignored by the empress, even though he was nominally head of the regency council.

The Porphyrogenite Maria enrolled under her banner Italians and Georgians and attracted much popular support. She turned the precinct of St. Sophia into an armed camp. Troops loyal to the empress launched an assault on it which was only partially successful. Finally, in May 1181 the patriarch was able to negotiate a truce between the Porphrogenite and the empress's party. The Porphrogenite and her husband were allowed to go free, but their supporters were left in prison.

During this 'Holy War,' as Eustathios called it, the opponents of the empress's regime increasingly looked towards Andronicus Komnenos, who remained in his Paphlagonian lair. His sons Manuel and John were supporters of the Porphyrogenite and were now in prison. Their sister escaped from the capital to her father's court and persuaded hum that Constantinople would welcome him as a deliverer from the tyranny of the present regime. Andronicus had little difficulty in convincing himself that it was his duty to go to Constantinople to protect the interests of the young emperor. He was clearly in danger from his mother and her lover, the protosebastos. Andronicus met very little resistance as he advanced upon Constantinople in the early spring of 1182. Once he arrived opposite the capital, all he could do was wait, since the crossing to Constantinople was barred by the navy. The decisive event was the desertion of the commander of the fleet to Andronicus. The empress and her lover were abandoned by their supporters and then seized by their Frankish bodyguard who handed them over to Andronicus. The city was Andronicus's for the asking, but before he formally entered he sent in his Paphlagonians, whom even the Byzantines regarded as barbarians. They at once set about massacring the Latins settled there. They were assisted by the Constantinopolitan populace, who envied the Latins their wealth and resented their mounting influence in the capital. The initiative for the massacre came from Andronicus. He regarded the Latins, who had supported the empress's regime, as potential opponents. Their removal was a necessary step on the way to power. In the past Andronicus had been a leader of anti-western opinion at the court of Manuel Komnenos. He must have hoped to gain the support of those most bitterly opposed to the Latins. These included men of influence, bureaucrats and churchmen. Andronicus capitalized on rumors that were floating about that the empress had been bidding for the support of the Latins, "promising that she would hand over the city to them and would place the Byzantines under their authority." Andronicus's motives were political, but he unleashed Byzantine resentment against the Latins. A religious element soon entered into the massacre. Latin priests and monks were singled out by the mob. A cardinal who happened to be in Constantinople was murdered. The hospital of the knights of St. John was sacked. The Byzantine clergy were prominent in directing attacks on the Latins.

Though Eustathios might claim to be horrified by the massacre of Latins, it was very much to Andronicus's short-term political advantage. It cowed potential opposition and won him the support not only of the people, but also of an influential section of the bureaucracy. For a time he could do more or less as he pleased. The Porphyrogenite and her husband were treated as a potential threat. They were confined in the imperial palace, where they died mysteriously, perhaps poisoned by one of Andronicus's eunuchs. The empress was accused of plotting with enemies of the state. She was found guilty. She was first consigned to a nunnery and then secretly drowned. The Patriarch Theodosius did not possess the stomach to face Andronicus and preferred to go into retirement. He knew that he would be called upon to sanction Andronicus's elevation to the imperial office. This duly occurred in September 1183 and the young emperor was strangled at the first convenient opportunity. The aging Andronicus completed his triumph by marrying the eleven year old Agnes of France, the young emperor's consort. It was a bloody path to the throne, but not quite unparalleled in the annals of Byzantium. In the past, such blood-letting ushered in a period of political stability, but not on this occasion. Within two years Andronicus would be overthrown by those forces which had raised him up and he would be put to death in ways more revolting than even he had devised for his opponents.

Andronicus came to power with the support of both the court aristocracy and the populace of Constantinople. The former soon learnt that their trust had been misplaced. The alienation of the populace took longer, for Andronicus cultivated their support. He used the Constantinopolitan mob as a political weapon. He manipulated it through demagogues, whom "he encouraged to consult with him. They were a wretched class of persons, brawlers and agitators, kings in their own company." He boasted to his sons that in this way he had been able to rid himself of the 'Giants' and they would be able to rule over Pygmies. It was a bitter jest, which he had cause to regret, but one that revealed an anti-aristocratic program.

His intentions were apparent in the fresco he had put up of himself in the church of the Forty Martyrs, which he restored as his family shrine. It portrayed him dressed in the smock and long white boots of a Byzantine peasant, holding a sickle (drepanon) in his hand. Because the sickle allegedly curved round the bust of a handsome man, the composition was interpreted at the time as betraying Andronicus's intention to murder the young emperor, Alexius II Komnenos. This is hardly likely to have been the meaning that Andronicus intended. The fresco was designed for public consumption, since it was painted on the gate of the church looking towards the great avenue of Constantinople, the Mese. It Is much more likely that Andronicus wished to present himself as the good husbandman with the interests of the peasantry at heart. He went out of his way to publicize the punishment he meted out to one of his trusted agents, who had stopped with his retinue in a peasant household and had not only failed to pay for his board and lodging, but had also taken all the peasant's carts.

Andronicus's plans for reforms were directed towards the provincial administration and the well-being of the peasantry. he was meeting the mounting criticism there had been at the end of Manuel Komnenos's reign about the condition of the peasantry, who were suffering at the hands of oppressive squads of tax collectors. Andronicus tried to ensure that the provincials only paid their regular taxation and were protected from the surcharges which were imposed by unscrupulous tax-collectors. He made sure that these fiscal posts went to honest men and were not simply sold to the highest bidder, as had been the case previously. He appointed good men to provincial governorships and paid them decent salaries in the hope they would not oppress the cities.

Only for Attica do we possess material which enables us to test how genuine or how effective these reforms were. Michael Choniates, the archbishop of Athens, has left the distinct impression that a real effort was made in Attica to improve the standard of the administration. The provincial governors who had been drawn almost without fail from the great court families now came from more modest administrative backgrounds. If there was a genuine desire for reform, practical considerations ruled out any real alleviation of the lot of the peasantry. A new tax register was drawn up for Athens, which took into account tax exemptions granted by the imperial government, but an official at Constantinople refused to enroll the new register. It was clear that that financial needs of government precluded real concessions.

Andronicus's reforms might well have foundered on this financial impasse, even if his energies were not increasingly taken up with the need to crush aristocratic opposition. The usual assumption is that Andronicus was intent upon eradicating the aristocracy or, at least, aristocratic privilege from the outset. At least one of the measures he is known to have taken as regent for the young emperor can be construed as an indirect attack upon the aristocracy's landed property. In December 1182 he repealed a law of Manuel Komnenos, by which imperial grants of landed property could only be alienated to members of the senate and army. The aristocracy built up its estates very largely through imperial grants of property. Manuel's legislation was designed to protect aristocratic estates. It would be easy to interpret Andronicus's measure as a first step towards dismantling the system of aristocratic privilege which was at the heart of the Komnenian system of government.

Aristocratic opposition to Andronicus was apparent several months before he had recourse to this measure. A conspiracy was hatched in August or September by Andronicus Angelos and Andronicus Kontostephanos. They had been Andronicus's two main backers among the aristocracy. They had engineered his seizure of power to rid themselves of the empress's regime. They found that they were still excluded from power. Worse, it was becoming clear that Andronicus was using demagogues and the mob to make himself independent of his aristocratic supporters. Andronicus learnt of the plot and pounced. The Angeloi managed to escape his clutches and got away to Syria, but Andronicus Kontostephanos and many other conspirators were taken and blinded.

Outside the capital several of the towns of Asia Minor had been opposed to Andronicus from the start. When he was marching on Constantinople in the spring of 1182 the city of Nicaea refused to open its gates to him and soon afterwards the Grand domestic John Batatzes came out in open revolt, making Philadelphia his base. His rebellion divided the Anatolian cities into pro- and anti-Andronican factions. Even though the rebellion was put down with relative ease, there was an undertow of discontent in the Anatolian cities, which opponents of Andronicus might be able to exploit.

In September 1183 Isaac Angelos and Theodore Cantacuzenus seized Nicaea, while Isaac's brother Theodore established himself in neighboring Prusa. The fortress-town of Lopadion soon went over to the rebels. It remains a mystery why these Bithynian towns should so willingly have lent their support to the rebel cause. There is nothing to suggest that the Angelos or Cantacuzenus families had estates in the region. They might nevertheless have been able to count on some local support, because their allies, the Kontostephanos family, possessed the Bithynian monastery of Elegmoi, and this must have been a center of local influence.

Andronicus took his time. He had to rally support. In retrospect, his benevolence seemed so extraordinary that this period of his rule was referred to as the 'Halycon Days.' He also had to stress his right to rule, now that he had ridded himself of the young emperor. He went on a pilgrimage to the monastery of the Kosmosoteira at vera in Thrace. This was founded by his father, the Sebastokrator Isaac Komnenos, and there he had been buried. Andronicus was underlining that he had a legitimate claim to the throne, inherited from his father. Andronicus's circumspection worked. The western armies and their commander, Alexius Branas, remained loyal. With their support the rebellion was easily crushed. Andronicus would seem to have eradicated all internal opposition. Members of the aristocracy were sullenly loyal, under lock and key or had fled the country. yet scarcely a year later he was to be overthrown.

Two set of circumstances conspired to bring this about. Andronicus allowed himself to become increasingly isolated. He relied upon an inner circle of advisers and agents. They were not drawn from the great families, whether of the court or of the bureaucracy. Some of them may have come from the fringes of the court, but the majority were of obscure origins: they were loyal and prompt to obey Andronicus's often harsh orders. They were only too quick to mutilate and impale those that Andronicus felt to be a threat. In his isolation he became increasingly suspicious and reacted to his suspicions with needless cruelty. At the same time, he became more openly contemptuous of the people. For their part the people of Constantinople were beginning to be sickened by Andronicus's cruelty.

Andronicus's hold on power depended upon a reign of terror. It left him isolated from all but his trusted servants, but apparently in command. The weakness of his position was immediately revealed by the first major foreign challenge that he faced. It came from the Normans of Sicily. The Sicilian court sheltered many Byzantine aristocrats, who sought Norman backing to overthrow Andronicus. The Normans were happy to have an excuse to invade the Byzantine Empire. A pretender claiming to be the murdered Alexius II was duly produced to give greater respectability to the undertaking. In June 1185 the Norman expedition arrived before the city of Dyrrakhion. It fell with scarcely a blow. The disaffection of the Byzantine aristocracy was evident. The commander of the garrison, John Branas, preferred to be led away to a comfortable captivity in Sicily, rather than to return to face Andronicus's wrath. The Norman army advanced on Thessalonika, which they reached in August and where they linked up with the Norman fleet. The people of Thessalonika heartened by their Archbishop Eustathios's decision to stay with them offered spirited resistance, but the imperial governor, David Komnenos, conducted a defense of the city that was negligent to the point of treachery. Andronicus sent an army to the relief of the city, but its commanders, largely drawn from the great aristocratic houses, proved half-hearted either deliberately or out of loss of morale.

The fall of Thessalonika sealed Andronicus's fate. he pretended to be unmoved by the Norman invasion, but one action showed how it had affected his confidence. A well-connected reader of St. Sophia unwisely criticized Andronicus for his cruelty and he was led off for execution, but Andronicus then relented, when news came that the Normans had taken Dyrrakhion and were now advancing unopposed on Thessalonika. In the face of failure he withdrew more and more into the pleasures of his suburban palaces. This was to be his undoing. The details of Andronicus's overthrow are sickening, but the outline is simple enough. He sent one of his agents to arrest Isaac Angelos who was confined to his mansion and was suspected, probably rightly, of being the center of any remaining aristocratic opposition to Andronicus's regime. Isaac killed the emperor's agent and fled for sanctuary to St. Sophia, where other members of his family joined him. They appealed to the people of Constantinople, who rose up on their behalf and proclaimed Isaac emperor. Andronicus was slow to react, because he was away from Constantinople, staying in one of his palaces. He hurried back to the Great Palace, but the situation was quite out of control and he decided to flee to Russia. He was taken near the mouth of the Bosporos, brought back to Constantinople and delivered up to the malevolence of the mob. He was subjected to the most appalling indignities and died horribly in the Hippodrome.

There is no evidence that Isaac Angelos came to power through some carefully laid coup. It seems to have been a spontaneous reaction on the part of the people of Constantinople. For the historian Nicetas Choniates it was further proof of their notorious fickleness. Pure emotion had a part to play. They were alarmed by Andronicus's failure to deal with the Norman invasion. They had begun to disapprove of his cruelty. The mob could also be manipulated, as Andronicus had shown. He had played upon their self-regard and had given them a glimpse of their power. To withdraw his favor was to play a dangerous game; to show his outright contempt was foolish. It is often argued that much more important than any such explanations for the mob's changing mood was Andronicus's willingness to countenance the return of Latins to Constantinople. This is to assume that the main motivating force behind the activities of the Constantinopolitan crowd was blind hatred of the Latins. There is no denying that it was a factor, but only one among many. In 1185 there is no sign that anti-Latin feelings had any part to play. This is in contrast to what happened two years later, when there was an attack upon the Latin quarters of Constantinople. That whole episode is very instructive for the motivation of the Byzantine mob. Isaac Angelos put down a dangerous revolt thanks to the support of a western prince, Conrad of Montferrat, and a scratch body of Latin knights and mercenaries. To celebrate their victory the Latins began to plunder Constantinople and invited the proletariat of the city to join in, which they did with a will. There was a reaction of the part of the craftsmen of the city. They suffered from the mob going on a rampage and they could not stand the way the Latins boasted of their victory over a Byzantine general, rebel that he might have been. They accordingly organized an attack upon the Latin quarters, it has to be said, with scant success. The lesson both of this incident and of the massacre of 1182 is that the people may have resented the presence of the Latins in Constantinople, but they only turned on them on those occasions when they had been drawn into Byzantine politics. They were suspect, less because they were foreigners and Catholics, more because they had become a political force. In 1185 this did not apply. The people turned on Andronicus because he had failed, because he had isolated himself, and because he had offended them.

Andronicus exercised a fascination for contemporaries. The story of his downfall was soon circulating in semi-legendary form in the West. Byzantines tried to explain him, but his Protean character seemed to defy explanation. They were amazed by his apparent inconsistency, but this was as much a reflection of the price paid for consistent opposition to his cousin Manuel Komnenos. He was forced out of Constantinople and blown along by chance. His opposition to Manuel Komnenos may have sprung from an envy rooted in the accident of birth, but he became identified with currents of criticism, opposed to the system of government presided over by Manuel Komnenos. These are reflected in the history of Nicetas Choniates. They amounted to a demand for less Latin influence, for a fairer system of taxation and more equitable provincial government. It was a call for a return to the ideal of the Macedonian emperors and it was most likely to have appealed to the bureaucracy.

One of the most persuasive interpretations of Andronicus's reign has been put forward by Professor AP Kazhdan. He sees Andronicus as trying to re-establish a bureaucratic regime in key with the ideals of the Macedonian emperors. To do this he had to sweep aside the privileged position of the aristocracy. Kazhdan views the emergence of a hereditary aristocracy under the Komneni as part of the natural development of the Byzantine Empire. Andronicus's reactionary policies were therefore, in his view, bound to fail. The grip of the Komneni on the highest positions of state began to relax and new names appear. Eunuchs, so redolent of Byzantine government under the Macedonian emperors, reappear in the highest reaches of government.

This analysis has to be taken further if the real importance of Andronicus's reign is to become apparent. The first point to be made is that in political terms bureaucrats are not very powerful under Andronicus, certainly not as powerful as they were to become under the emperors of the house of Angelos. Bureaucrats had become accustomed to being servants of the state. They welcomed the reforms introduced by Andronicus, while regent for the young emperor. However, disillusion soon set in. Nicetas Choniates, who approved of the reforms in principle, preferred to retire from the administration rather than to continue to serve Andronicus. His disapproval was directed against the style of Andronicus's government and the role accorded to his agents. It was also a recognition that the reforms could not work. They were being used in the end as publicity material to justify a cruel regime.

A positive desire for reform changed into the revenge of an outsider on the society which had rejected him. the careful balance of privilege, order and obligation which had characterized Komnenian government, was undermined. Hopes of reforming the common interest had proven to be empty. It would be left to Isaac Angelos to try, in vain, to restore the balance under the Komnenos and to give to the government of the Byzantine Empire a new purpose and sense of direction.

It would have needed a ruler of the highest caliber to surmount the difficulties that faced the Byzantine Empire in 1185. Isaac was still comparatively young when he was thrust so unexpectedly into supreme office. His main asset seems to have been his amiability, which rescued political life from the brutality which had characterized it under Andronicus. It favored his guiding aim which was a return to the compromises that had underpinned Manuel Komnenos's rule. The difficulty was that he had at the same time to establish a new dynasty in power. The Angelos were only one of the competing families which had emerged out of the fragmentation of the Komneni family. They were usually closely connected with the imperial dynasty; their fortunes depending on a marriage to a Komnenian princess. The rise of the Angeloi began with the marriage of the obscure Constantine Angelos to the youngest daughter of Alexius I Komnenos. Their stock had risen markedly because of the way they had led the opposition to Andronicus Komnenos. They clearly had a following both in the capital and the provinces. Having secured the throne, Isaac faced the jealousy of other aristocratic families. This in the end would prove his undoing, for they objected to the way he concentrated power in the hands of a small clique. They were able to overthrow him and to replace him with his worthless elder brother Alexius.

The most pressing problems that Isaac faced on coming to power were ironically in the realm of foreign policy. Andronicus's usurpation had provided a pretext for those that had guaranteed the young Emperor Alexius's II's succession to invade the Byzantine empire. The Hungarian King Bela invaded the Balkans and had reached as far as the key fortress-town of Sofia, thus beginning the destabilization of the Balkan provinces. Then, of course, there were the Normans, who were advancing pell-mell on Constantinople. Isaac put Alexius Branas, the most respected of the Byzantine generals, in sole command of the Byzantine forces. On November 7, 1185, he suddenly attacked the Normans and won a complete victory. The Normans evacuated Thessalonika in panic and fell back on Dyrrakhion. The next spring Isaac took charge of the siege of Dyrrakhion, which soon fell. The Normans suffered enormous losses, both in killed and captured.

Alexius Branas emerged from this victory with the greatest credit. He was remembered as "small in stature, but colossal in the depth and the deviousness of his understanding and by far the best general of his time." The Branas family had been prominent since the middle of the eleventh century, but they had largely steered clear of the Komnenian court, preferring to dominate their native city of Adrianople. Alexius Branas reckoned that he now had the power and prestige to make a bid for the throne. His first attempt was a fiasco. He sought sanctuary in St. Sophia, hoping that his exploits in battle would win him the support of the people of Constantinople. None was forthcoming and he had ignominiously to throw himself on the emperor's mercy. His military talents were too valuable and he was soon restored to command of the western armies. In 1187 he raised the standard of revolt once again, but this time he made Adrianople his base. He advanced on Constantinople meeting no opposition. Isaac was saved by his brother-in-law Conrad of Montferrat, who had recently married his sister Theodora. His energy and dash proved too much for the tactical skill for which Branas was renowned. Branas was left dead on the field of battle.

The Foundation of the Second Bulgarian Empire

Just at the moment when Isaac seemed to last thoroughly in command of his Empire, the situation in the Balkans began to deteriorate alarmingly. he had managed to dispose of the threat from Bela of Hungary very neatly. He negotiated a marriage with Bela's daughter Margaret and received back as her dowry the Balkan provinces that the Hungarians had occupied. A special tax was then levied on these provinces to pay for the wedding festivities. The Vlachs of the Balkan mountains (Stara Planina) refused to pay. At much the same time, two chieftains Peter and Asan came to Isaac who was encamped on the plains of Kypsella and requested the grant of a village somewhere in the Balkans. Their demand was turned down. One of the emperor's uncles hit Asan across the face for his insolence. The brothers returned again, determined on revenge. They found the Vlachs of the Balkans reluctant to join in any revolt, even though the demand for a special tax had left them disaffected. To win them over the brothers took a most remarkable step. They annexed the cult of St. Demetrius to their cause. "In order to overcome the reluctance of their fellow countrymen the brothers erected a chapel dedicated to the good martyr Demetrius. There they brought together many …from both races…They stoked up their enthusiasm by assuring them that the God of the Bulgarians and Vlach nation had vouchsafed them their freedom and assented to the shaking off of their age-old yoke, for the Christ-martyr Demetrius had abandoned the city of Thessalonika along with his church there and his residence among the Byzantines, in order to dwell among them and to act as a guide and a collaborator in their undertaking."

An appeal couched in these terms rings true. The loss of Thessalonika to the Normans must have made a great impression throughout the Balkans, The cult of St. Demetrius was by no means limited to the citizens of Thessalonika but spread throughout the Balkans. Serbs were numbered among the confraternity of St. Demetrius, who resisted the Norman assault upon the city. The cult of St. Demetrius had the added advantage of uniting the Vlachs and the Bulgarians, the two peoples who took part in the uprising. They shared a common pastoral life among the mountains of the Balkans, but they were separated by language and traditions. The Bulgarians could look back to the glories of the Bulgarian Empire. The Byzantine occupation did not put an end to the use of Old Church Slavonic as a liturgical language and the Gospels in Old Church Slavonic continued to be copied. The Vlachs had their own traditions of an origin among the Roman colonists of Dacia.

The testimony of Nicetas Choniates suggests that Peter and Asan were Vlachs rather than Bulgarians. In the opening stages of the rebellion the Vlachs played a more prominent part than the Bulgarians, simply because it was centered on the hilly interior of the Balkans, where the Vlachs were dominant. As the rebels established themselves, so the Bulgarian element came to the fore and the Bulgarian traditions of empire asserted themselves. In its origins the rebellion owed much to the traditional suspicion and dislike of the pastoralist for established order. This can only have intensified as the Byzantine administration tightened its grip on the interior of the Balkans. At the same time, aristocratic and monastic estates were spreading inland into the pastures of the Balkans. The Vlachs had to pay various dues, the most important of which was a tithe on their beasts and flocks. This went either to the state or to a landowner. Byzantine control over the pastoralists of the Balkans was threatened by a new element in the population -- the Cumans. The main bulk of these Turkish tribesmen were encamped beyond the Danube in southern Russia, but large numbers were recruited into the Byzantine armies and some were given pronoiai in the Balkans. They were a disturbing influence, contesting or usurping the rights of neighboring landowners. In the theme of Moglena, to the northwest of Thessalonika, they seized the planina or pastures of Pouzouchia and subjected the Vlachs and Bulgarians settled there to their authority. They built a sheep-fold and refused to pay the tithe on flocks. In 1184 the imperial government had to issue an order restoring control of the region to the rightful owner, the Athonite monastery of Lavra. It is not likely to have had much effect.

The Cumans would prove a decisive factor in the opening stages of the rebellion. Without their support it would probably have been crushed. In 1187, fresh from his triumph over Alexius Branas, Isaac Angelos set out to deal with the rebels once and for all. He managed to get his army into the hilly center of the Balkans and to defeat Peter and Asan, who fled to the Cumans beyond the Danube. Isaac returned to Constantinople, convinced that the country had been pacified. He did not even see the need to leave any garrisons behind to hold the country down. Peter and Asan returned with Cuman support and soon reestablished themselves. This time Isaac failed to get to grips with the enemy and was lucky to extricate his army from the interior of the Balkans. The chance to nip the rebellion in the bud had gone. negotiations with Peter and Asan came to nothing and the rebellion spread, as other Vlach chieftains asserted their independence. The initiative had passed into the hands of the rebels and it was all that the Byzantines could do to protect the regions of Adrianople and Philippopolis in the Maritsa valley. The passage of Frederick Barbarossa's crusade across the Balkans in the summer of 1189 confirmed this state of affairs. It also encouraged Stefan Nemanja, the Serbian ruler, who had been content to sit on the sidelines, to repudiate his alliance with Byzantium and to attack Byzantine territory. He sacked the key point of Skoplje.

The whole of the Balkans was slipping out of the Byzantine grasp. In 1190 Isaac made a desperate attempt to recover the initiative against the rebels. Once again he led an army into the interior of the Balkans. The Vlachs obstinately refused to fight, but they caught the Byzantine army as it was retreating southwards through the passes of the Balkan mountains and inflicted a heavy defeat. Isaac could not wipe his hands of the Balkans. He had devoted too much of his energy to suppressing the rebellion; he had invested too much prestige in the effort to subdue the Balkans. As a last desperate throw he organized a joint operation with his father-in-law, the Hungarian King Bela. It came to nothing because Isaac was dethroned before he took the field. His failure against the rebels was a contributory factor in his overthrow. He lost the support of the army, which was unwilling to endure the discomforts of another unsuccessful campaign.

Isaac was supplanted by his elder brother Alexius, who in all things took the line of least possible resistance. he called off the campaign against the Vlachs and Bulgarians and used the war chest to buy himself support. He was content to contain the rebels. There was sense behind his minimalist approach. The Vlach chieftains had begun to quarrel among themselves, and Alexius exploited their squabbles. He was also fortunate that the Cumans were defeated in 1201 by the Russians of Galicia and this deprived the rebels of the Cuman aid on which they relied. The original leaders of the rebellion, Peter and Asan, split with one another in 1193. Asan was murdered by one of his boyars in 1196 and the next year Peter was assassinated. leadership now passed to their youngest brother Joannitsa. he had been a hostage at the Byzantine court. His energies were to be directed towards laying the foundations of the second Bulgarian Empire. In 1202 Alexius came to an agreement with Joannitsa. The Byzantines were left in control of Thrace, the Rhodope mountains and Macedonia, but in return they recognized Bulgarian independence. Alexius was a realist and it was all that he could reasonable hope to salvage.

Local Separatism under the Angeloi

Conditions in Asia Minor were not so very different from those existing in the Balkans. Beyond the frontiers were Turcoman nomads who were only too happy to have an excuse to raid the Byzantine provinces in search of plunder and winter pastures for their flocks. The Byzantine frontiers in western Anatolia were subjected to increasing pressure. The understanding which had existed for much of Manuel Komnenos's reign with the Seljuk Sultan Kilidj Arslan was breaking down. Andronicus's usurpation provided a pretext for Turkish aggression. A series of pretenders, claiming to be the murdered Emperor Alexius II, appeared along the frontiers. They were given unofficial Turkish backing and found some local Byzantine support. The cities of Asia Minor had been a scene of unrest since the reign of Andronicus. The new wave of Turkish raids meant that the border towns had more than ever to fend for themselves. A place like Philadelphia looked for its defense to its own inhabitants, who were famed for their skill at archery. Rather than rely on the doubtful support of Constantinople the people of Philadelphia preferred to raise up their own ruler. His name was Theodore Mangaphas, a local man. He was proclaimed emperor and even minted his own coins. He soon brought under his control the inland areas of the theme of Thrakesion. Isaac Angelos could not let this challenge to his authority go unchecked and he led a punitive expedition against Philadelphia. News of the approach of Frederick Barbarossa's crusade forced him to withdraw. He recognized Mangaphas as de facto ruler of Philadelphia on condition that he gave up his imperial claims and sent his sons as hostages to Constantinople. When Frederick Barbarossa's crusade passed by in the spring of 1190, Philadelphia acted as though it was an independent state. It was only some three years later that Mangaphas was driven out and Philadelphia was brought back under the nominal control of the imperial government. Mangaphas fled to the Seljuks of Konya and with their backing did much damage along the frontiers. He was able to re-establish himself as ruler of Philadelphia in the chaos that accompanied the arrival of the fourth crusade and the overthrow of Alexius III Angelos in 1203.

It was at exactly this juncture that Theodore Laskaris, a son-in-law of Alexius Angelos, escaped from Constantinople to Asia Minor. He began to lay the foundations of what was to become the Nicaean Empire, the most successful of the Byzantine successor states after 1204. He was able to come to terms with local rulers, such as Theodore Mangaphas at Philadelphia, and in this way harnessed the separatist tendencies of the Anatolian cities. In much the same way, the grandsons of the Emperor Andronicus Komnenos were able to get away to the Pontos region, where they built on the traditions of local independence associated with the Gabras family to create the Empire of Trebizond. The political fragmentation of the Byzantine Empire after 1204 was anticipated by such traditions.

The emperors of the house of Komnenos were normally able to check local independence, but there were some provinces that were always likely to flare up in rebellion; the island of Cyprus, for example. In May 1123 the imperial governor was murdered in an uprising and a Byzantine emissary to the court of Antioch only just escaped with his life. The Cypriots were regarded as a separate people by the Byzantines. Their church at St. Barnabas was autocephalous. The island was on the very fringes of the Byzantine Empire and its interests seemed to lie with the crusader states and Cilician Armenia rather than Constantinople. It was treated very much as a colonial territory. Its bishops and governors were sent out from Constantinople and were not chosen locally. The Byzantine government was mainly concerned to get as much as it could out of the island by way of taxation and, in order to do so, treated the peasantry abominably. The contempt of the Constantinopolitan for the Cypriot is evident in Constantine Manasses's account of his stay on the island. At church he had found himself next to a local man, who smelt so strongly of dung and garlic that he had to order him to move away. Since this had no effect, he hit him, with the desired result. There would seem to be all the ingredients of a rebellion, but, when it came, it surprisingly had no local support. In 1184 the island was seized by Isaac Komnenos, a nephew of the Emperor Manuel Komnenos. He forged letters purporting to show that the Emperor Andronicus had appointed him governor of Cyprus. Once in power, he assumed the imperial title. Many of the local nobility fled abroad. When Richard Coeur de Lion stopped at Cyprus in 1191 he was welcomed by the local people as a deliverer.

Isaac Komnenos's tyranny sets in relief some of the more positive features of the Byzantine administration of Cyprus during the twelfth century. It respected the rights of the people who counted, the local archontes. In addition, its governors and bishops proved to be generous patrons of the church in Cyprus. To judge by material remains the twelfth century was a golden age in Cypriot monasticism. Artists of considerable talent were brought in from Constantinople to decorate the monasteries of Koutsovendi, Asinou, Lagoudera and the hermitage of St. Neophytos outside Paphos. Where evidence has survived, the patrons of this work were the Byzantine bishops and governors. Such benefactions mollified local opinion. Much less in known about Crete, but the pattern seems to have been much the same. The governors and their staff were sent out from Constantinople, but society was dominated by a series of archontic families. Isaac Angelos found it prudent to confirm them in their estates and privileges.

Under the Angeloi the imperial government found it more and more difficult to control local power, whence the increasing lawlessness in many provinces. In the south-eastern corner of Asia Minor an archon of the town of Mylasa simply appropriated an olive plantation, which he leased from the monastery of St. Paul on Mount Latros. After his death his heirs proved no more amenable to the demands of the monastery for the return of their property. The monastery had the support of the imperial administration, but this seems to have had no effect. The local archontes did much as they pleased. In Epirus a local magnate backed by an armed retinue carried off a rich widow and forced her to marry him. He obtained a statement from his fellow archontes of the town of Koloneia to the effect that no force had been used to acquire his wife. The upshot was a vendetta between the magnate and his bride's family. Her brother came and seized him. He then married his sister off to somebody of his own choice. The Angeloi were learning to condone the excesses of local power rather than risk open rebellion. How else were they to ensure the continuing collection of taxes, which was the primary function of the imperial administration!

The fatal weakness of provincial administration under the Angeloi was a willingness to connive at local power with oppressive and erratic taxation. The praitor of the theme of Hellas descended upon Athens, demanding to be put up with all his train. Tax commissioners wanted payment for the privilege of assessing the taxpayer for taxation. Demands were made for additional taxes. Worst was perhaps ship-money. This was raised by three different agencies -- the praitor's staff, the Grand Duke's agents, and by Leo Sgouras, who was in control of the town of Nauplion. Athens was apparently more vulnerable than its neighbors, Thebes and Eurippos, which were able to fend off the demands for taxation. In the end, the people who paid were the peasantry, and Michael Choniates, the archbishop of Athens, ended a petition he addressed to Alexius III Angelos in 1198 with a plea that the archontes of Athens should be prevented from acquiring more peasant land. The peasants were in danger of being 'blown hither and thither like leaves before the wind'. Michael Choniates bewails the failing prosperity of Attica. The main cause was the oppressive fiscal administration. Worse still, for all their demands the imperial government failed to protect the region from the depredations of the pirates who now swarmed through the Aegean. The failure of the imperial government was reflected in the way local men established themselves as independent rulers in the Peloponnese. Such a man was Leo Sgouras. He inherited control over the town of Nauplion in the Argolid from his father and he took advantage of the chaos existing at the end of the century to extend his authority to Argos and Corinth. He almost certainly had local backing. His opponents were bishops, such as Michael Choniates, who kept alive traditions of loyalty to the imperial government at Constantinople. The truth was that by 1203 the imperial government had lost effective control over most of the provinces of the Empire. It was just one sign of the way the Empire was collapsing from within.

Court, Capital and Politics -- Demoralization at the Center

The woefully poor standard of provincial administration under the Angeloi can only be understood in the light of the politics of the court and capital. Isaac Angelos tried to hold the balance between different factions, interests and families in Constantinople after the manner of Manuel Komnenos, but unlike Manuel he had no obvious foundation for his authority. He did not trust his brothers and other relatives and his children were still too young to be useful to him. His solution was to seek the support of the bureaucracy. He put his maternal uncle Theodore Kastamonites in charge of the administration with the title of Grand Logothete. He was then succeeded by Constantine Mesopotamites, who was still a young man, and his ascendancy over the emperor was the cause of some resentment. He was singled out for particular criticism by the 'holy man', Basilakios, who seems to have been a spokesman for those opposed to Isaac. His criticisms were very soon followed by the coup that brought Alexios Angelos to the throne. It was engineered by a powerful faction among the court aristocracy. Its leaders were Theodore Branas, George Palaiologos, John Petraliphas, Constantine Raoul and Manuel Cantacuzenus. It was the first time a group of aristocratic families had openly got together at Byzantium to decide upon the succession. They agreed that Isaac had failed both the Empire and themselves. They expected Alexius Angelos to rule in their interests.

Alexius Angelos was only too well aware of the interlocking factions that existed at court and threatened the throne. His strategy for survival was, we know, to take the line of least resistance, to be as generous and malleable as he could. He made grants of landed property and state revenues to those that asked. He almost never refused a request. Whether he was in a position to carry out his promises was another matter. Almost as a matter of course, his immediate family were among the beneficiaries of his bounty; his wife, in particular, upon whom he relied very heavily. She came from the great bureaucratic family of Kamateros. Thanks to her he left the bureaucracy very much to its own devices. There were some able men in charge of affairs in his reign. They included among others the historian Nicetas Choniates, who became chief minister. The task that he set his civil service was well-nigh impossible, because of the ludricrously generous way in which he granted away the tax revenues of the state. They were reduced to slapping surcharges on to the basic land tax to raise more revenue or exploiting special taxes, such as ship-money. Alexius's slack administration was paid for in fiscal abuse, with terrible consequences for its provinces. Alexius also expected the administration to make up its lost revenues by checking all manner of possible infringement of privileges that had been issued. The monastery of the Lavra on Mount Athos was involved in a tedious lawsuit with the maritime bureau over the question of whether it paid customs duties on wine transported in its ships. Before the case was finally settled in the monastery's favor there were no less than four sessions, each involving a minimum of five assessors and seven judges. The administration was getting choked with time-consuming detail.

The failure of Andronicus Komnenos's reforms was bad for civil service morale. Any claim to be working for the common good disappeared. Civil servants seemed now to be motivated by a desire to show off their technical expertise and to line their pockets. This state of affairs was aggravated by the freedom of action that the bureaucracy enjoyed under the Angeloi emperors. Increasing paper-work demanded an increase in staff. The lists of officials in different departments leave the distinct impression that at the end of the twelfth century the civil service was expanding and abuses that had perhaps been kept in check were now rampant. Isaac Angelos was accused of "putting up offices for sale, like a street trader with a barrow load of fruit." Nepotism was rife; Constantine Mesopotamites used his influence to fin various members of his family jobs in the administration. The most flagrant example comes from the maritime bureau, where a John Mesopotamites is found acting on behalf of his brother Michael. It was a common practice at this time for a civil servant to get a relative to carry out his duties in a particular office. The civil service was a battleground for competing cliques. The Mesopotamites would be ousted by Nicetas Choniates's clique. This included his brother-in-law John Belissariotes, who held the position of Grand Logariast, in other words the head of the financial administration. His brother Michael Belissariotes held the office of prefect of the city. Civil service families began to monopolize different offices. When Demetrius Tornikes, the logothete of the drome, died in 1201, he was succeeded in his office by his son Constantine. They preferred to stress their personal achievements rather than their descent from an ancient family. This stress on ability gave the civil service dynasties a sense of moral superiority, which marked them out as an elite, but set them apart from the court aristocracy.

For all that, they were preoccupied with their own struggles and interests in Constantinople. Their members had very little time to spare for the problems of the provinces. It was even difficult to get them to leave the comforts of the capital and take up posts which they had been given in the provinces. Michael Choniates put it very well: "The luxury-loving citizens of Constantinople have no desire to peep out from behind the safety of their gates and walls and take regard for neighboring cities, so that they can benefit from their good fortune. All they do is to send out tax-collectors…wave upon wave of them to strip the cities of their remaining wealth." Constantinopolitan indifference was cause for bitterness.

At one point it seemed as though Alexius and his government might be brought to heel. At Christmas 1196 Alexius was confronted by a demand from the German Emperor Henry VI that unless a sum of 5,000 pounds of gold was paid immediately he would invade the Empire. Alexius temporized and was able to get the sum reduced to 1,600 pounds of gold, still a hefty sum. In order to raise it, he proposed to impose a special levy to be known as the German tax. He sought to gain popular assent to this measure by calling a 'parliament'. It consisted of members of the senate, but reinforced by representatives of the clergy and guilds of Constantinople. He presented his plans for the apportioning of the new tax. His proposal was greeted with uproar. He was accused of squandering public funds and of appointing his relatives to provincial governorships, "all of them useless creatures," blind in some cases. He hurriedly dismissed the assembly and looked for other means of raising the money. He at last hit on the idea of plundering the imperial tombs in the mausolea on either side of the church of the Holy Apostles. They were broken open and their treasures disgorged. The emperor's agents were just beginning to prise open the tomb of Constantine the Great, when word came that enough treasure had been collected. It amounted to over 7,000 pounds of silver. It turned out to be something of a windfall, because Henry VI died in September 1197 and the money was never dispatched. It gave Alexius a breathing space. He had cash in hand and could afford to ignore his critics from the safe distance of the Blakhernai Palace. He became increasingly isolated from his capital.

This is apparent in the festivities he arranged to celebrate the double wedding of his two daughters in the spring of 1199. It was at carnival time, when races were traditionally held at the Hippodrome, but Alexius refused to allow these to go ahead. Instead, he pit on a travesty of the games in a special theater he had constructed at the Blakhernai Palace. The prefect of the city who was a eunuch disported himself on a gaily caparisoned cock-horse, as the master of ceremonies. There were foot-races, from which the ordinary citizens were excluded. These were contested by the golden youth of the court. The spectacle was reserved for the emperor, the empress and their courtiers. It was this kind of tomfoolery which so alienated people from the imperial office. When after 1204 men came to consider the causes of the fall of the Byzantine Empire they singled out the luxury and vice of the imperial court.

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Last modified: Thurs Dec 10, 1998